Compensation for former LIAT Antigua workers, but colleagues’ pending talks – PM Gaston Brown

Last Updated on Wednesday, 20 November 2024, 23:14 by Denis Chabrol

Antigua and Barbuda-based former employees of the bankrupt and shuttered LIAT (1974) Limited would soon receive some monies from the government there, but their counterparts in Guyana and other countries would have to await talks among the former shareholder governments, according to Antigua and Barbuda Prime Minister Gaston Brown.

“Our government has issued a bond of $17 million to assist the LIAT (1974) workers who were displaced not because we have any legal obligation so to do but, as a worker organisation, the Antigua and Barbuda party, we felt that it was important to make a compassionate payment and that bond is going to be issued in a matter of weeks,” he said at the official welcome ceremony for LIAT 2020’s inaugural flight to Guyana.

He later told Demerara Waves Online News that none of the shareholding governments in LIAT (1974) Limited, as a limited liability company, had any liability to the staff and the company had no assets. As such, he said the staff could not have relied on sale of assets for them to be paid.

Asked about the fate of the other now laid-off staff in Guyana and other countries, he said shareholder governments would have to decide how to deal with those persons. “We’d have to look at that. I think we’d want to get the other shareholder governments together to see how it could be addressed,” he said. Mr Brown said Antigua and Barbuda was open to any regional initiative on how the plight of former LIAT (1974) Limited workers could be addressed.

The LIAT (1974) shareholder governments had been Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Dominica, and St Vincent and the Grenadines.

LIAT 2020, which has been capitalised with just over $200 million Eastern Caribbean dollars, is a joint venture between the Antigua and Barbuda government, and Air Peace Caribbean Limited, a subsidiary of Air Peace that operates in West Africa.